There’s really no IMAGERY at all in this film, but look — a primordial Dean Stockwell!

“Be nice to the next Jew you meet, because he might be a gentile,” is how one friend characterized GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT, rather acidly, in which journalist Gregory Peck goes undercover as a Jew. This doesn’t involve the use of a big papier-mache head, as we used in NATAN (we had our reasons), but simply a bit of barefaced lying. The film means well, and director Elia Kazan does manage to get human hatpeg Peck to unclench very slightly, plus it has Dorothy McGuire and Celeste Holm. But it notably comes to life in scenes with actual Jewish characters (John Garfield, Sam Jaffe), actual antisemites, or both (self-hating Jew June Havoc). Which suggests that the plot device, rather than being an accessible way in to the story for middle America, may in fact be acting as a barrier between the subject and its emotional potential.

Plus it’s all very serious, despite being basically SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. It never pokes fun at its earnest hero, who’s always right. It never really acknowledges that for all the tension he feels and humiliation he puts up with (in ONE SCENE), he has it dead easy compared to actual, genuine Jews, and that his ability to go back to his true identity at any instant rather lessens the burden he feels (think Pulp’s Common People). And nobody comments on the fact that his article, conceived as I Was Jewish for Six Months, finally appears as I Was Jewish for Eight Weeks. Time off for good behaviour?

An intriguing and cold frame about the distance between people — but Kazan doesn’t recognize it for what it is, thinks it’s just an establisher, and cuts to a cosy two-shot the second Garfield (right) sits down.

Kazan reckoned that he didn’t start shooting expressively until PANIC IN THE STREETS, and that’s borne out by the staid, static, medium-shot-heavy “photographs of people talking” approach on display here. The nice liberal story gets a nice, bland treatment. The performances do help, and Moss Hart’s placid script is entertaining in a gentle, trundling way, springing to something more like life whenever we get closer to the actual issue. Kazan admitted the film wasn’t unsettling and didn’t go deep, but at least the story idea allows a WASP into the drama, whereas his other race movie, PINKY, the story of a mixed-race girl passing as white, is totally compromised by the placing of white girl (and limited actress) Jeanne Crain in the lead. You can make valid points, but your credits sequence has already announced that you don’t entirely believe in any of them, or not as much as you believe in the law of box office.

The Geographical Werewolf sub-sub-genre was inaugurated by Guy Endore’s terrific novel The Werewolf of Paris, and swiftly developed by Hollywood with Werewolf of London, where Henry Hull and Warner Oland got hairy around the Mother of Parliaments. John Landis’s AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, easily his most interesting and effective film, is today the best-remembered entry in the G.W. field.

SHE-WOLF OF LONDON fails to satisfy. Essentially a Scooby Doo version of SUSPICION, it shilly-shallies around for nine-tenths of its duration, with all the action happening offscreen. Things pick up markedly in the last ten minutes, with director Jean Yarborough pouring on the dry ice fog and dutch-tilting the camera like a drunken sailor, but the revelation that there’s NO WEREWOLF takes the wind out of his sails. The credit “Make-up effects by Jack P. Pearce” promises much to a Universal Studios horror fan, but the great monster-maker’s work turns out to be confined to some fake wrinkles (very MUMMY-like) on a maidservant.

June Lockhart, as the heiress convinced she’s a wolf-woman, is cute and appealing, but always seems an unlikely lycanthrope, while the true culprit is constantly sinister even when trying not to be. The most convincing relationship in the film is between the two cops, who are like a bickering old married couple, although they’re not very convincing as Scotland Yard detectives.

More interesting, if not necessarily very effective, is WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON, which doesn’t really attain the status of satire, at least not consistently, but is unusually directed — some weird, gratuitous bit of artsy technique enlivens most every scene — and does spin a few interesting things from its central conceit. Dean Stockwell, a fascinating actor whatever the film, plays Jack Whittier, a journalist recruited to work in the Whitehouse, bitten by a gypsy wolfman as he attempts to leave Hungary to take up his post. The opening reprises the Lon Chaney WOLFMAN with wit and low-budget panache, making the most of an obviously inadequate lighting budget.

“That it could happen… in America. That it could happen… now. That it could ever happen… to me…” the film kicks off with these words, tremulously uttered by Stockwell in V.O. over a long lens moonrise against the Washington skyline, while the titles play out and the music warbles, and none of these visual and aural elements quite connect with each other. This odd, off-key beginning is maybe the high point.

Elsewhere we get dwarf actor Michael Dunn as mad scientist Dr. Kiss, and arch references to the Watergate Hotel and lines like “Well, you won’t have Jack Whittier to kick around anymore.” Most amusingly, when Stockwell tries to concoct a less plausible explanation for his lapses of memory, he hits on the plot of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and suggests that he’s been brainwashed to act as an assassin for the communists. But while there are a few amusing political quotations, and a little bit of parody of Washington lifestyles, there’s virtually nothing about policy, making it a would-be political satire without any politics. It (ouch) lacks bite.

The print seems to be faded down one side, and is hideously speckled and cropped to 1:1.33, but that just added to the nostalgia value of the fashions and filmmaking. What became of Milton Moses Ginsberg, writer-director of this geo-lycanthropic politico-horror satire? According to the IMDb, after finishing this one he lay down to rest for twenty-six years, returning to our screens with THE HALOED BIRD, a short film, in 2001, in which he himself plays… the Golem.